My luck was clearly in, and my exultation made me careless.  A stone, on which a foot rested, slipped and though I checked myself at once, the confounded thing rolled down into the hollow, making a great clatter.  I plastered myself in the embrasure of the rock and waited with a beating heart.  The place was pitch dark, but they had an electric torch, and if they once flashed it on me I was gone.  I heard them leave the platform and climb down into the hollow.  There they stood listening, while I held my breath.  Then I heard ’Nix, mein freund,’ and the two went back, the naval officer’s boots slipping on the gravel.

They did not leave the platform together.  The man from the sea bade a short farewell to the Portuguese Jew, listening, I thought, impatiently to his final message as if eager to be gone.  It was a good half-hour before the latter took himself off, and I heard the sound of his nailed boots die away as he reached the heather of the moor.

I waited a little longer, and then crawled back to the cave.  The owl hooted, and presently Wake descended lightly beside me; he must have known every foothold and handhold by heart to do the job in that inky blackness.  I remember that he asked no question of me, but he used language rare on the lips of conscientious objectors about the men who had lately been in the crevice.  We, who four hours earlier had been at death grips, now curled up on the hard floor like two tired dogs, and fell sound asleep.

* * * * *

I woke to find Wake in a thundering bad temper.  The thing he remembered most about the night before was our scrap and the gross way I had insulted him.  I didn’t blame him, for if any man had taken me for a German spy I would have been out for his blood, and it was no good explaining that he had given me grounds for suspicion.  He was as touchy about his blessed principles as an old maid about her age.  I was feeling rather extra buckish myself and that didn’t improve matters.  His face was like a gargoyle as we went down to the beach to bathe, so I held my tongue.  He was chewing the cud of his wounded pride.

But the salt water cleared out the dregs of his distemper.  You couldn’t be peevish swimming in that jolly, shining sea.  We raced each other away beyond the inlet to the outer water, which a brisk morning breeze was curling.  Then back to a promontory of heather, where the first beams of the sun coming over the Coolin dried our skins.  He sat hunched up staring at the mountains while I prospected the rocks at the edge.  Out in the Minch two destroyers were hurrying southward, and I wondered where in that waste of blue was the craft which had come here in the night watches.

I found the spoor of the man from the sea quite fresh on a patch of gravel above the tide-mark.

‘There’s our friend of the night,’ I said.

‘I believe the whole thing was a whimsy,’ said Wake, his eyes on the chimneys of Sgurr Dearg.  ’They were only two natives—­poachers, perhaps, or tinkers.’